E-Kantipur

After his whizzing whirlwind tour of Nepal earlier this month, one of the places Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited in the Middle East was Abu Dhabi where he spoke of energy security.

He should have done that in Kathmandu as well. He would have, perhaps, if only he had stayed for at least a day and witnessed two-third of it without power supply.

“To reduce the problems and inequality brought by the energy and resources issues, countries in the world should take further action and exert more effort,” he said in his keynote speech at the opening of the World Future Energy Summit.

Another keynote speaker at the summit, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, talked about reducing “energy poverty.”

“Widespread energy poverty still condemns millions to darkness, to ill health, to missed opportunities for education,” he said.

The fifth World Future Energy Summit also marked the launch of his initiative — 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All.

Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Maria van der Hoeven said funding and political will would be crucial for removing barriers to universal access to energy.

These ideas and initiatives for energy security may work well elsewhere sooner or later, as one in five persons globally has no reach to electricity. But not in Nepal, at least not as long as its messy politics persists.

So indifferent Nepali politicos have become to the issue that many of them now believe people will have to put up with the power crisis during dry season as they do with rains in the monsoon.

“Would they have dared to think so if they were really doing politics for the people?” you can very validly ask.

Or, you can ponder, “Why can they not think about this pressing issue instead of harping all the time on those illusive issues like federal and central governing structures that they themselves are not clear about?”

And if you are an avid follower of geopolitics, you might have even  wondered, “Why do these one after another parties measure their government’s ‘success’ in terms of “support of the major powers” in the region, while they have painfully failed their own people by depriving them of their basic rights to energy?”

Now that they don’t seem to get it that power-deprived people are just not interested in any of their empty isms, it is perhaps time to use their own trump cards to get things done.

A petition by the people to the “international powers the parties are so loyal to” could do the trick perhaps.

If power crisis is Nepal’s internal matter, so are the faltering peace process and the constitutional conundrums.

When the parties are not offended by the time-to-time reminder that they need to step up the peace process, there is no reason for them to become jittery if  the power issue is raised by outside forces as well.

Both China and India are providing aid for the power sector anyways. So they do have the right to ask why is it not being used to provide relief to the Nepalese people?

Remember how the Chinese government had asked the then Prime Minister Madhab Kumar Nepal to first utilise whatever aid was given earlier before asking for more for the power sector?

Questions by regional powers will also put to rest suspicions that geopolitics might have hampered progress of some of the major hydropower projects - if it really has not.  

And why just by the regional powers? That Nepalese people have been deliberately deprived of power should be an issue even international forums like the United Nations need to raise.

Just like it raises, for instance, issues of infringed rights of people to protest, or lack of basic things like water for that matter, in one or the other country.

Remarkably, Ban’s initiative of the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All was mandated by the UN General Assembly.

So what that the general people who have suffered because of the severe power cuts cannot get themselves heard in the general assembly?

There are other forums like the upcoming UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), where civil societies can let the world know how a country that should have been exporting clean energy like hydropower to the region is being forced to grope in the darkness.

Naming and shaming the responsible quarters in multilateral forums happens elsewhere as well.

Green energy campaigners including those of the UK, for instance, have complained to the European Commission that the British government has favoured nuclear power to the disadvantage of other energy industries.

In Nepal’s case, multilateral agencies like the World Bank can help Nepali people expose the culprits: By bringing out its experience why, for instance, the bank’s assistance in the power sector has not been able to move ahead even at critical times like this.  

The international financial agency had long back launched its project to identify the problems that plague the sector and, among other things, help repair the power plants whose output has begun to dwindle.

For all the quarters that claim to be concerned about the otherwise-manageable power crisis, it is time to speak out.

While the world talks about energy security, Nepalis outside the manipulated political sphere should at least throw some light on the darkness—how their country has not been allowed to secure its share of power.   

Khadka is a BBC journalist based in London

    navin.khadka@gmail.com

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